Tag Archives: meta

Some Geek Feminism folks will be at the following conferences and conventions in the United States over the next several weeks, in case contributors and readers would like to have some informal get-togethers to reminisce and chat about inheritors of the GF legacy:

First, some logistics; then some reasons and reminiscences; then, some thanks.

Logistics

The site will still be up for at least several years, barring Internet catastrophe. We won’t post to it anymore and comments will be closed, but we intend to keep the archives up and available at their current URLs, or to have durable redirects from the current URLs to the archive.

There’s a Twitter feed and a Facebook page; after our last blog post, we won’t post to those again.

We don’t have a definite date yet for when we’ll post for the last time. It’ll almost certainly be this year.

I might add to this, or post in the comments, to add stuff. And this isn’t the absolute last post on the blog; it’d be nice to re-run a few of our best-of posts, for instance, like the ones Tim Chevalier linked to here. We’re figuring that out.

Reasons and reminiscences

Alex Bayley and a bunch of their peers — myself included — started posting on this blog in 2009. We coalesced around feminist issues in scifi/fantasy fandom, open culture projects like Wikipedia, gaming, the sciences, the tech industry and open source software development, Internet culture, and so on. Alex gave a talk at Open Source Bridge 2014 about our history to that point, and our meta tag has some further background on what we were up to over those years.

You’ve probably seen a number of these kinds of volunteer group efforts end. People’s lives shift, our priorities change as we adapt to new challenges, and so on. And we’ve seen the birth or growth of other independent media; there are quite a lot of places to go, for a feminist take on the issues I mentioned. For example:

We did some interesting, useful, and cool stuff for several years; I try to keep myself from dwelling too much in the sad half of “bittersweet” by thinking of the many communities that have already been carrying on without waiting for us to pass any torches.

Thanks

Thanks of course to all our contributors, past and present, and those who provided the theme, logo, and technical support and built or provided infrastructure, social and digital and financial, for this blog. Thanks to our readers and commenters. Thanks to everyone who did neat stuff for us to write about. And thanks to anyone who used things we said to go make the world happier.

This is an edited version of an email I wrote to other Geek Feminism bloggers following adoption of the Geek Feminism Code of Conduct and during the drafting of Mary’s postmortem, in response to some concerns that we have not in fact improved anything over our previous ad hoc processes, particularly in cases where there are fears a harasser will threaten or commit self-harm in response to any consequences for their harassment.

Here are the differences I believe our Code of Conduct will make to handling harassment incidents in our community:

We’re removing harasser leverage.

Not strictly Code of Conduct, but code-adjacent: we’ve been working to eliminate single points of failure in our social and technical infrastructure, and are getting an established ethic in place of treating those as a problem both for logistical and for potential harassment/abuse reasons.

Our formal reporting process allows us to respond faster.

Previously, knowledge about the harasser had to work its way through back-channels. Relevant decision makers could go unaware of the situation for months, and the victim’s privacy was reliant the discretion of an expanding group of people.

Now, there is a clear reporting process that allows people with concerns to reach the people empowered to act on those concerns all at once, in confidence.

A Code of Conduct focuses the conversation on the specific incident in question.

Without a Code and anti-abuse team in place, any harassment situation is a conflict over what is and isn’t acceptable in the community. At least one person — the harasser — thinks what they’re doing is cool. Getting them to stop isn’t just about enforcing community standards — it’s also about establishing them.

With a Code in place, everyone has agreed ahead of time that these are the rules. Whether the harasser personally feels that it’s okay to — say — hug people without consent, they are bound by a harassment policy that forbids it. It takes the conflict out of the realm of values and concepts — “is it okay to hug people without consent?” — and into the realm of facts — “is this person hugging people without consent?”

A public Code of Conduct will help hold us accountable.

Another way that Codes of Conduct make communities safer is that public commitments help hold organizations accountable to their values. We have made a public commitment not to tolerate harassment, and to do whatever we need to do to prevent it — including removing people. That, again, takes the question away from general community values and into the specifics of the particular case in front of us.

None of us want someone to go hurt themselves, but none of us want harassers around, either. We’ve now publicly stated that the latter is our first priority in harassment cases. That moves the conversation from “is it okay to remove someone if they might hurt themselves?” to “is there any way to mitigate the risk that this person we have to remove might hurt themselves?”

That public commitment is also going to help inoculate us against second-guessing in other cases — like if we have to remove a beloved member of the community, or someone who we feel bad for because they are socially awkward, have no other support network, are going through a rough time, etc. I’m not saying it’s going to eliminate all difficulty or make us completely heartless to a person’s circumstances. But we’ve now put up our community’s reputation as collateral, which is going to provide a strong incentive to stick to our stated principles.

Our investigating process protects victims from the harasser and their friends.

Anyone who’s been part of a community that had to vote or consense on removing somebody knows that those discussions can flirt with community-wrecking disaster. If we didn’t have a process and I had to tell all the bloggers that, say, Liz was harassing me (she’s not, but if she was), fear of the ensuing drama would be a strong incentive against coming forward. I would be inclined to keep it to back-channels until I was confident I had enough support to get her removed and not get blamed for being mean to her/starting drama.

The anti-abuse team is empowered to keep my report in confidence and act on it — without me having to publicly name my harasser and potentially endure the whole community debating my safety in front of me (and my harasser). That would make me feel more comfortable coming forward sooner.

There’s still a possibility that people might choose to leave the community over an anti-abuse decision, or debate it in their own spaces. But the decision will get made without a lengthy and potentially hurtful public discussion, and we’re not going to have it rehashed in GF spaces after the fact. Victims of harassment do not have to fear that their safety or integrity will be a subject of public discussion or debate within GF.

The Anti-Abuse Team can move faster than the community as a whole

Related to the above: the Anti-Abuse Team is going to be able to move faster because we’ve already explicitly been empowered to make the decision, and can do so without having to engage the entire community in a very difficult and probably painful discussion.

The new process protects those who have to interact with a harasser outside of GF.

If Alice has to work with Barb and Barb is expelled for harassment, whatever Alice’s personal opinions on the matter, she can honestly say that she wasn’t involved in the decision (if Alice is on the anti-abuse team, she can recuse herself from Barb’s case). If Barb holds it against Alice anyway, then the fact that a formal process was followed gives Alice a much more credible way to describe the problem if she chooses to take it up with her supervisor, or the leadership of another community.

It also takes Alice out of the conflict between Barb and Geek Feminism so that it’s not an interpersonal conflict between two employees/community members (which is likely to be perceived as the fault of both parties), but rather a conflict between Barb and a third party (Geek Feminism) that Barb is unprofessionally/inappropriately bringing into the workplace or into the other community.

At the end of the day, our process is only as good as the people who implement it, and it won’t solve everything. But it can make it easier and safer for victims to come forward, and improve the speed and quality of our responses. It will also help protect both victims and the community from some of the pain and ugliness that poor harassment handling can cause.

As Annalee said in that announcement, this comes long after adoption of codes in other communities, especially events:

You’ve been promoting Codes of Conduct for years. Why didn’t you adopt one of your own sooner?

We dropped the ball in a big way here. We’ve known for at least two years that we needed a Code of Conduct internally. We’re sorry for the inexcusable delay.

We thought it would be useful to other communities to discuss how this happened.

Timeline

May 2008: Skud founded the Geek Feminism wiki, two and a half years before anti-harassment policies and codes of conduct began to be promoted by geek feminists.

August 2009: Skud founded the Geek Feminism blog, more than one year before anti-harassment policies and codes of conduct began to be promoted by geek feminists. At the time of launch. the blog had a strong comment policy which remains in essentially the same form (albeit expanded since). We weren’t the first by a long way to have such a policy (in fact it was based fairly closely on that of Hoyden About Town) but this was at the time unusual among the technical blogs and forums that many of the original bloggers frequented.

I have not found any discussion of Geek Feminism adopting such a policy internally at this time, which isn’t surprising considering it was envisaged as being for in-person events.

Early 2011: there were person-to-person complaints within the Geek Feminism community that an individual within it is harassing people when Geek Feminism contributors meet up in person (as sometimes happens at conferences we attend and similar).

January 2012: AdaCamp Melbourne (the first event I know of run by Geek Feminism community members that occurred after the development of the event anti-harassment policy) has an anti-harassment policy.

We are taking a few different steps to address the specific concerns raised. One is that we are reviewing our wiki pages to make sure that we have information on slut-shaming and that it is appropriately cross-linked with articles about sexualised environments at geek events to help reinforce/educate people that criticising an individual woman’s choice of clothing is very different from criticising (for instance) a business that uses booth babes as a marketing device.

The second thing is that we are setting up a process so that people can contact us if they experience harassment by someone associated with GF. This is a work in progress, especially since GF is (as mentioned) a loose affiliation with no official membership, and because we may be asked to deal with harassment that occurs outside our own spaces. However, if someone is harassing another person under GF’s name or in a way associated with GF, then we want to provide a private way for people to contact us, and respond appropriately.

At around this time, Skud founded Growstuff, reducing her available volunteer time; her participation in the blog and other Geek Feminism activities dropped drastically over the next few months.

July/August 2012: Emails about the harassment by a Geek Feminism member discussed earlier began to circulate among Geek Feminism bloggers, presumably with our awareness of internal harassment risks heightened by the public and private discussions of Nice Girl’s reports. More than one person reported feeling unsafe and no longer recommending our backchannels as safe spaces. Skud first became aware of these reports at this time.

Given the seriousness of a known harasser operating in a community central to anti-harassment policy promotion, it didn’t seem appropriate to wait for a policy and response group as mooted by Skud to be in place and instead Valerie Aurora spearheaded a letter asking this person to leave the community, which was signed by several others including myself. The person left our community.

After this, I cannot find any further internal discussion of an anti-harassment policy for approximately another year.

April 2013: Recognising her lack of availability for volunteering due to work commitments, Skud formally announced she was stepping down as a Geek Feminism administrator. There was a discussion about handing over various technical responsibilities but not (that I can find) about the anti-harassment status.

July 2013: I sent an email to the blogger backchannel reminding them that an anti-harassment policy is still to be developed. There was a short and inconclusive discussion.

October 2013: Annalee produced an early draft policy document with many unresolved questions, particularly who the policy was intended to apply to, and how reports would be resolved. Comments on the document were made by several community members.

November 2013: Rick Scott began to formalise existing editorial practice on the wiki in the Editorial guidelines page, which was revised over a few months by a small group of wiki editors. It is intended more to communicate norms to newcomers and onlookers than to protect wiki editors from each other.

January 2014: Discussion had died down on Annalee’s draft. I sent an email with some open questions but no one including myself follows up before May.

May 2014: Annalee produced a new draft anti-harassment policy and circulated it for discussion. Skud, Tim, Valerie and myself all commented and edited substantially. Annalee asked for consensus on adopting it, Valerie suggests she JFDI, and I ended up proposing a timeline through to late June for circulating it more widely, giving people time to familiarise themselves, appointing the Anti-Abuse team, and then making the document public.

Post mortem

Things we did right

Skud established best practices (particularly the comment policy) at the time our community was founded.

When it became clear that harassment in our community was a periodic problem, we acknowledged publicly that we had not put best practices into place (a anti-harassment policy) and began discussing one suitable to our community.

We returned to the issue periodically without further external prompting or known (to me) incidents of harassment and eventually got a policy in place. In the process, we hope we have developed a new best-practice policy for communities to use so that others do not have to go through this process.

Our new policy has a pretty sophisticated description of various types of harassment, based on a wide variety of personal experiences and reports of harassment received by those of us who do anti-harassment action or advising in other communities. It is better adapted for a long-lived community than the event policy is, by, eg, considering incidents of harassment in the past and in other communities. It has a more explicitly feminist stance in, eg, stating that it centres the concerns of marginalised people, and that tone-policing will not be regarded as harassment.

Things we did wrong

Various individual members of the community were slow to recognise harassment in our community based on first-hand reports from victims.

We were very slow at responding to the known need for a policy, especially for a group which was among the leaders in advocating that in-person events adopt policies. Even on the most generous reading of this timeline, there was explicit discussion of an internal anti-harassment policy in August 2012, at the time Skud discussed Nice Girl’s harassment, meaning that nearly two years passed between us explicitly committing to it existing and it being put in place. We seem to have been caught in a common problem here: we had no active need for the policy (that I know of personally), and so we did not push ahead with it.

Less central members of our community report that they wondered why we didn’t have a code of conduct, but did not feel empowered to ask about it.

Where to from here?

It is far better to have clear documentation concerning safety in particular, and common problems in general, before they are needed. We hope our reusable policy gets adopted by other communities or assists them in drafting their own, to avoid some of the slowness involved in starting from scratch.

Skud reviewed our community structure and documentation in the lead-up to her Open Source Bridge talk and found various inadequacies. She and Annalee have each raised the issue of reviewing our community’s processes,. We would need to look at questions such as:

are we following best practices in anti-harassment, anti-abuse and establishing safer spaces?

is our group unusually reliant on certain individuals and if so (it usually is so in any community), how can we share knowledge and resources so that there are less single points of failure?

is our documentation sufficient for a newcomer to the community?

Does anyone have pointers to similar review processes in other groups? That would be really handy.

Skud suggests that in addition, with important projects like a code of conduct, a relatively structureless group like ours explicitly appoint people to the project, so that they feel empowered to act on it. We particularly need to be alert to Warnock’s dilemma (does silence signify consent, ignorance, lack of understanding, lack of interest or contempt?) in discussing changes to our community. We also need to be alert to hidden hierarchies, to, eg, the sense that nothing can go ahead without approval from, say, Skud as founder or myself as the most frequent poster.

Annalee suggests that we need to improve our institutional memory with documentation like that above, together with internal private documentation where it is impossible to make things public. This helps identify when things were done for a very good reason, versus having emerged essentially by accident, versus never having been done at all by anyone. We also need to clarify (probably continuously) about whether we are a JFDI community, or whether projects must have people appointed to them, or other.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Annalee, Maco, Skud, Valerie and one of the linkspammers for their review of this post. Except where explicitly attributed, all opinions herein should be taken to be mine, informed by discussion with others in Geek Feminism but not necessarily co-signed by them.

This Code of Conduct applies to all Geek Feminism spaces, including this blog, the Geek Feminism Wiki, and all other Geek Feminism sponsored spaces. As of today, everyone participating in Geek Feminism spaces is expected to comply with the new Code of Conduct.

Violations of our Code of Conduct will be handled by our Anti-Abuse Team. This team is made up of people who are active in the various parts of the Geek Feminism Community, including the blog, wiki, and associated forums. Members of this team will serve staggered six-month terms before rotating off.

The current Anti-Abuse Team is Alex Bayley, Annalee Flower Horne, and Tim Chevalier. You can find contact information for us on our Report Abuse page.

QUESTIONS AND CONCERNS:

You’ve been promoting Codes of Conduct for years. Why didn’t you adopt one of your own sooner?

We dropped the ball in a big way here. We’ve known for at least two years that we needed a Code of Conduct internally. We’re sorry for the inexcusable delay. We are especially sorry to those who have been harassed within the Geek Feminism Community, and who had to fend for themselves in the face of that harassment because we had no system in place to protect them.

We’re working on a more detailed breakdown of what happened and what we and others can learn from this, but that’s a subject for a different post. It should be up within the week.

We’ve worked hard to design a code of conduct and complaint handling process that works well for social justice communities who interact mostly online, based on ideas in the Geek Feminism anti-harassment policy (which is designed for in-person events) and on advice we’ve received from GF Bloggers and advisors who run their own online communities.

We are releasing this Code of Conduct under a permissive license, so that other online communities can act more quickly than we did. Harassment occurs in online spaces as much, if not more, than at in-person events and we strongly encourage other communities to adopt a code of conduct too.

The comment policy is still in effect for the Geek Feminism blog. For a community as big as ours, a comment policy isn’t enough. For example, moderating comments is not an effective way to prevent a Geek Feminism blogger or wiki editor from harassing someone. Comments are not the only–or even the primary–way that folks within the Geek Feminism community talk to each other.

The new Code of Conduct provides a process by which we can handle and respond to reports of harassment in our community, regardless of who the harasser is and how they interact with Geek Feminism.

I [comment on Geek Feminism posts/edit the Geek Feminism wiki], but I’m not otherwise involved in Geek Feminism. Does this Code of Conduct apply to me?

Yes. While you’re in our spaces, our rules apply to you. However, blog moderators and wiki admins are already empowered to enforce standards of behavior in blog comments and on the wiki. The Anti-Abuse Team is unlikely to intervene in situations that moderators and wiki admins can handle on their own.

If you are being harassed in blog comments or on the wiki and the moderators or admins aren’t handling it (or if your harasser is a moderator or admin), we encourage you to report the situation to the Anti-Abuse Team.

I have a specific concern with part of the Code of Conduct.

Geek Feminism bloggers, wiki admins, and other members of our community have extensively reviewed and revised the Code of Conduct. We’re comfortable with it. If you have a serious concern about the Code of Conduct, and your concern is not addressed below under “Things We’re Not Debating,” you are welcome to let us know.

I’m pretty sure something I’m doing or have done in the past is banned under the Code of Conduct. Does everyone hate me?

You’re probably not alone, and it’s unlikely that everyone hates you, but that’s not the point. If you’re doing something that violates our Code of Conduct, stop immediately.

Please do not use any of our forums to process what you did, why you did it, and how you feel about it now. Please do not use any of our forums to try to get others to absolve you of what you did or to affirm your self-image as a good person in spite of your actions.

If you need help discerning whether something you did or are doing violates the Code of Conduct, or whether your continued presence in our community is appropriate, you should contact the Anti-Abuse Team.

THINGS WE’RE NOT DEBATING:

I hate the entire Code of Conduct, and/or I object to the concept of Codes of Conduct.

We’re not going to debate the merits of clear, specific Codes of Conduct. Geek Feminism has one. You can either accept it or leave.

I want to debate specific aspects of this Code of Conduct as an intellectual exercise, or to explain to you why ______ isn’t really harassment.

This Code of Conduct is not open for debate. Accept it or leave.

I’m not reading something that long.

Since you can’t read it at all without agreeing to a web browser’s End User License Agreement, we can assume you are capable of reading and understanding documents that are a lot longer and more technical than our Code of Conduct. Much like your browser’s EULA, our Code of Conduct is binding whether you read it or not.

Your section on complaints you won’t act on is [racist against white people/sexist against men/etc]. Why don’t you treat everyone equally?

Since you lack the reading comprehension to understand “we are not here to explain power differentials or other basic social justice concepts to you” the first time we said it, further discourse on this subject would be fruitless.

We encourage everyone who interacts with the Geek Feminism community–bloggers, commenters, wiki editors, admins, and our various friends and advisors–to familiarize yourselves with the new Code of Conduct. We know from experience that clear, specific Codes of Conduct make communities safer and more welcoming. We’re glad to have one in place for Geek Feminism.

For two years linkspam have been emerging from our anonymous Linkspamming team like clockwork. But a few are on hiatus right now and it’s again time to refresh the roster. We’d love to bring a few more linkspammers on board.

If you’re interested, read on.

What a Linkspammer does

A Linkspammer gathers together links submitted by readers (and optionally links they found themselves) and puts them on our blog in a linkspam post.

How the process works:

when you join the linkspamming team, you are subscribed to an email list where suggestions are sent and where you and other linkspammers can discuss things when needed

you sign up in advance to do linkspams in a schedule we maintain in Google Docs. Right now, you sign up to do either two Tuesdays or two Fridays in a row (eg, you might sign up to do Tues June 3 and Tue June 10), but this varies depending on how many spammers we have

in the 24 hours before your scheduled post, an email arrives which has gathered together link suggestions from comments here, from the bookmarking sites, and from Twitter

you paste that email into a WordPress post and start editing it, eliminating less good links entirely, and improving summaries, adding trigger warnings and such for the remaining links. You might optionally add links you’ve found yourself or sourced from somewhere else, but this isn’t needed.

you make the post live.

Most of the work of the linkspammer is now at step 4, where you exercise editorial judgement in including and order links and making sure all links have a representative quote or summary.

A Linkspammer needs:

to identify as a geek feminist or a geek feminist ally, and to generally like this blog

to be able to read and compose English similar to that in existing linkspams

ability to at least skim through links and summarise their content in a sentence or two, and warn for common triggers

familiarity with the WordPress posting interface (you don’t need to have adminned a WordPress blog, but you should have posted to one before, or otherwise have reasonable previous exposure to blog posting)

some editorial judgement: being able to decide if a link is worth sharing or not, and to select 6-12 links for the spam

able to plan a few weeks in advance and commit to producing linkspams when you said you would (with reasonable allowances for unplanned things, of course, we all have other things going on!)

ability to keep an eye on all the linkspams, just so that yours has new links in it

ability to put up with occasional public criticism, and apologise if you agree you made a mistake: sometimes our readers criticise linkspams, although not very often, and unless they violate the comments policy we will generally let the criticisms remain publicly visible.

willingness to read a moderate amount of email, as you’ll be part of discussions between Geek Feminism bloggers, and while our normal volume is 0–10 emails a week, in busy weeks it could rise to up to 40.

willingness to use Google Docs for scheduling and documentation

We’d like it if the Linkspammer(s) could commit to at least six months as a spammer, and can give at least a couple of weeks notice if they need to move on, so that their replacement can be found and work handed over.

The time commitment is around about one to two hours every time you sign up to do a linkspam post, perhaps a bit longer your first couple of times. You’ll do around two posts in every four to six weeks.

Please note: we cannot pay Linkspammers (or any other contributor), you will be working as an unpaid volunteer.

How to join us

Let us know in comments if you’re interested in helping out as a Linkspammer: make sure to leave an email address in the email address field.

Privacy note: because WordPress.com doesn’t allow a single post to have moderated comments, comments may be briefly made public if you’ve commented here before. We will make your volunteering offer private as soon as we can. Emails left in the email address box will not be publicly visible at any time.

We don’t need a whole resume, but a sentence about your previous involvement in geek feminism would be good, eg “I’ve been commenting here for months” or “I write about geek feminism stuff sometimes on my blog” or etc.

I just want to contribute links, not do entire linkspam posts!

We welcome your help! You can contribute links without having access to the blog or needing to tell us you’re interested. The best way to do this is to sign up for a Pinboard account and begin saving links there tagged “geekfeminism“.

If that doesn’t work for you, our automated link-gathering system now also checks the “geekfeminism” tag on the competing bookmarking sites Delicious and Diigo; the “#geekfeminism” tag on Twitter; and comments on existing linkspam posts. If it works better for you, make suggestions through any of those, they’re just slightly less well-tested than our Pinboard support.

Skud and I were both separately musing recently on the complex ancestry of some of the Geek Feminism, geek feminist, geek social justice and similar initiatives. Things like this: Double Union arose partly from discussions among AdaCamp San Francisco alumni, AdaCamp is a project of the Ada Initiative and draws on my experiences with my earlier LinuxChix miniconf (later Haecksen) event, the Ada Initiative exists in turn partly because Valerie Aurora and I met through LinuxChix, and so on.

As an example, here’s the portion of the graph that relates most closely to the origins of the Geek Feminism blog and wiki, and the projects that have arisen from them:

Part of the Geek Feminism family tree

Important note: this is an edited version of the graph that excludes many projects not so directly related to the Geek Feminism blog and wiki. You can see the most recent version of the full image for a better idea of how complex this is. Please check it before reporting that your project hasn’t been added yet!

Contribution guidelines:

This project is ongoing and does not claim to be complete. We’d love your help. Corrections and additions welcome! If you’re a github user you could submit a pull request directly to Skud. Otherwise feel free to leave comments here with suggestions of what nodes and lines to add, change, delete or annotate!

A line is intended to denote some form of influence or inspiration, not ownership or perfect agreement. So, for example, a project might have been inspired by another, or filling gaps in another, or founded by members who met through another, and so on. The two projects may or may not be aligned with each other.

You can view a fuller description of some of the relationships between projects in the source file for the graph.

At this weekend’s One Web For All hackathon, several Geek Feminism bloggers and some wonderful new volunteers completed the migration of geekfeminism.org from a fairly custom self-hosted WordPress install to wordpress.com’s hosting. We’d relied on plugins for many of the particularities of running a large, controversial group blog, and over the years most of those plugin features have been added to wordpress.com.

I wanted to extend thanks to the following people for their help with the migration:

Faruk Ateş and Cori Johnson for putting on the best hackathon I’ve ever attended. This migration was a task I’d been dreading for months, and you created a space where it felt safe to ask for help and make mistakes.